DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. STSdb vs. TigerGraph

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. STSdb vs. TigerGraph

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

A complete, distributed, parallel graph computing platform supporting web-scale data analytics in real-time

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#360	Overall
	#52	Key-value stores

Score	1.83
Rank	#139	Overall
	#13	Graph DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

www.tigergraph.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.tigergraph.com

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

STS Soft SC

Initial release

1984

2019

2014

2011

2017

Current release

v20, April 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language (GSQL)

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API

GSQL (TigerGraph Query Language)
Kafka
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Role-based access control

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